The fantasy sport industry has received a considerable amount of negative attention due to the proliferation of daily fantasy sports (DFS). DFS providers extended traditional fantasy sport consumption through the development of a user-friendly game where participants can wager money daily or weekly on a multitude of sporting events. This interface is very similar to that of Internet gambling, w...

Financial conspiracies today blend together antisemitic tropes and spiritual visions with ideals of political reform economic salvation. It is tempting to locate such phenomena at the periphery financial order, situating them within a delusional space beyond judicious concepts money, finance, wealth, value. But also possible take paranoid finance as an extreme, radical appropriation logic inher...

This essay works toward an integration of psychoanalysis and rhetorical theory in response to the poststructural critique of mediation. I argue that the concept of communication, usually understood as the mediation or reconciliation of Self and Other, is based on what Lacan termed the “fundamental fantasy.” Distinct from the conscious fantasies usually analyzed by rhetorical critics, the fundam...

Like many massively-multiplayer role-playing games, Final Fantasy XI is a persistent world with a heroic fantasy setting. This paper discusses fictive player identities, and describes specific visual and ludological tropes of race and nationality, and the techniques by which the game engineers the complicity of the player in the problematics it represents. Some of these are coherent with themes...

Theorists examining children’s understanding of the mind have been particularly interested in pretence as it may be a marker for early understanding of mental representation (Leslie, 1987). Although Lillard (1993a, 1996) found that children appeared not to understand that pretence involves mental representation or even the mind, Lillard and Sobel (1999) showed that for certain types of pretence...

OBJECTIVE To examine the relationship between thought-action fusion (TAF) and schizotypy. METHOD In two separate samples of undergraduate students (Ns = 77 and 64), correlations were computed between a measure of TAF and indices of schizotypy and fantasy proneness. RESULTS Positive correlations were found between TAF and various aspects of schizotypy (i.e. perceptual aberration, magical ide...

AIMS This study aimed to establish the contribution of hallucination proneness, anxiety, suggestibility, and fantasy proneness to psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) reported during brief sensory deprivation. METHOD Twenty-four high and 22 low hallucination-prone participants reported on PLEs occurring during brief sensory deprivation and at baseline. State/trait anxiety, suggestibility, and fa...